The Marsh, in San Francisco, is the Bay Area’s answer to Son of Semele’s Solo Creation Festival in L.A. The San Francisco venue, however, is a year-round breeding ground of solo performances. Echo Brown’s Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters was supposed to run through August, and has been extended through October, understandably so given the blend … Read more
From Paul Verdier to Dakin Matthews to A. Jeffrey Schoenberg to Stephen Sachs Paul Verdier (contributed by Steven Leigh Morris) Steven Leigh Morris – Stage Raw Yet another passing of another era was marked September 6, when actor-director-playwright-producer Paul Verdier died of complications from Parkinson’s Disease while under hospice care in West Hollywood. Read more… … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – Stage Raw Perhaps it’s Quixotic, but I find Theatricum Botanicum to be a kind of beacon, a shining light on the hills of Topanga Canyon. The alfresco venue was co-founded by TV actor and Old Leftie Will Geer, whose fame was cemented – if fame is ever cemented – by his role … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly We haven’t been treated fairly, and everybody knows it, says actress Maria Gobetti. She’s objecting to the union’s elimination of L.A.’s 99-Seat Theater Plan, which, for the uninitiated, was in effect for a quarter century and permitted union actors to work in theaters of up to 99-seats in L.A. … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – @ This Stage magazine Steven Leigh Morris: Things have gone very quiet in the past couple of months. You’d almost think that nothing is happening. Rebecca Metz: There’s a lot of anger, in the older generation particularly. Personally, I can’t function holding that much anger. My goal is to get the … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly A solo show’s a little show where people talk about their life, “Like battling the bottle. Or slicing themselves with a knife, “They tell their tale with wigs or props, with easels to communicate, “Like being gay or being bi or being trans or being straight! Read more…
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly One of the Hollywood Fringe Festival’s many venues is an old van laden with graffiti and suitcases, with shrinelike decorations in the back. The vehicle, like the show that occurs within and around it, is called Hamlet-Mobile, a notion written and directed by Lauren Ludwig and presented by a company … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly So you’re a theater having a hard time getting audiences. A new plan under way by the ever-tempestuous L.A.-based theater website Bitter Lemons allows you to pay the website directly for a published review, with the reviewer receiving the lion’s share of that payment — no guarantee of a good review, … Read more
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly “Why don’t you shut up, you daft prat?” says Lenny (Jason Downs, resembling young Malcolm McDowell) to his father, Max (Jude Ciccolella), in Guillermo Cienfuegos’ top-flight revival of Harold Pinter’s 1965 comedy The Homecoming at Pacific Resident Theatre. Read more… Now running through July 26.
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly At 60 years old, the spry, lean, silver-haired Sal Lopez could well be Puck’s dad. And it could be argued that Lopez’s picaresque autobiographical one-man show, This Is a Man’s World at Los Angeles Theatre Center, is a memory play. That’s because it opens with Lopez screaming on a hospital bed … Read more